The Obstacles We Face
When speaking about studying abroad, many people, especially those from my home country, would think it means another “rich kid” is going to spend several years playing, wasting time and parents’ money. In other words, an international student’s life abroad should be easy and relaxing in many people’s eyes. However, only we know what kind of challenges and difficults we encounters while studying abroad.
Among all those obstacles that make our lives not “easy and relaxing” such as food, weather and cultrual shocks, language barrier is definitely one of the highest mountains we need to overcome. Even though we all have been learning English for more than a decade, college level reading and writing are still miserable experiences for many. More importantly, language barrier doesn’t only negatively affect study, but also greatly hinder the ability for international students to socialize. As one of those students who suffered from such problem, I will elaborate a little on how this problem affects my life and how I plan to mitigate it.
Just to provide some background knowledge, I personally studied IB program in my high school and honestly speaking, I could always “neil it” in academia. Before I actually started my life in college, I never thought that English will be a problem for me. The first incident made me realized the issue was how struggling I was when studying History in the first quarter. Thanks to the academic advisor who selected History(I won’t mention which specific class I took here. It was just one of the classes under the category of History which can satisfy criteria D :) ), apart from the already-difficult-to-follow lecture, I was required to read through around 100 pages of readings per week. Not only there were so many of them, those academic journals were so dry and difficult to understand for me. As to today, I still can’t imagine how I managed to survive the last quater. Although I did survived from it, I deeply realized that English will still be an aspect that I need to put more effort into.
After realizing the problem, I also concluded several possible causes that act as barricades in my English learning. First of all, I didn’t speak English very often. Possibly due to the reason that all my roommates are from the same country where I come from, we seldom spoke English in out daily lives. Without a proper language environment, I reckon it is rather difficult to make improvement in language. In order to change this situation, I think there are several things I could do: 1. Join a club and meet more friends who are native speakers. 2. Speak up more in class 3. Go to office hours and have more in-depth conversations with professors. Besides oral English, I was not reading enough materials in English as well. This issue is simpler to solve than the last one as I have recently created a book list with a dozen of books I want to finish reading before the end of this year. Moreover, I decided to take the initiative of read news from Wall Street Journal and the Economist Every week. Also, I plan to read on some scientific magazines such as Nature in spare time.
Above is my reflection on the difficulties we, international students, faced in our day to day lives.
